[pde-ui-dev] Problems with PDE (Bugs or features?): update site, feature

[Gabriel Petrovay <gabipetrovay@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I have spotted a couple of ugly things that happen in PDE while testing 
to deploy combinations of plug-ins and features for several different 
operating systems.

The basic idea of the below scenario that reproduces the problems is the 
following: I want to build an Eclipse Plug-in that contains platform 
dependent libraries. Then I try to build an Update Site such that the 
user accesses it and sees only the plug-in/feature corresponding to 
his/her platform. I have tried in a couple of ways to build the update 
site for this scenario:

I. First trial:
---------------

1. I make 3 Plug-in projects named: "Test Win", "Test Linux" and "Test 
Macos". All 3 plug-ins have the same ID: "test".

2. I make a feature project names "Test Feature" having "test.feature" 
as the ID of the feature. In the project creation wizard, on the second 
page, I can select the plug-ins to put in the feature.

3. 1st BUG? You see all 3 plug-in created before as: test (1.0.0). Which 
of them is which? Anyway, you select all 3 since you want to make a 
feature containing all 3.

4. 2nd BUG? You go to the Plug-ins page of the feature.xml editor. You 
see all 3 plug-ins. Delete one and try to add it again.... You cannot 
because here the validation is done such that the plug-in ID is unique.

5. 3rd BUG? On the same feature.xml editor page you can select for each 
plug-in an different OS. In order to see which plug-in is which you 
double click on its name. Surprise: all three lead to the same.

This gives an answer to the 3 problems: All 3 "test (1.0.0)" are the 
same plug-in and point to the first plug-in in alphabetical order of the 
project name. Plug-in version numbers play no role in this story. In you 
give different version numbers to the plug-ins they still point to the 
first one. So only the ID is important.


So one cannot make a feature with the same plugin for 3 operating 
systems. Apparantly this is obvious since "there can be only one": 
test_1.0.0.jar. But maybe this scheme is not the best.


The second trial to build this update site (still with problems) will 
come in a subsequent e-mail.

Regards,
Gabriel